Satya SKJ
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
Writer, Contributing Editor & Moderatorhttp://www.SQL-Server-Performance.Com
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well there is no code really. it was more of a general question. basically i have a star structure. the parent and child tables have primary keys with clustered indexes. when i create a non clustered index on the joining column on the child table, my reads are roughly half of what they are w/o the non clustered index. however the duration is about the same. i run the dbcc freeproccache command before i run the query.

i can't speak for everyone else, but the reason i was looking at reads is because the hard drive is the bottle neck. i thought logically the more reads there are, the more the hard drive is doing, thus the longer the query takes. mainly i was looking at duration. that is my primary goal. i don't care what else is going on really (to an extent of course) as long as the query runs fast. as i said in my first response, my question was a general one. meaning, why is it that reads doesn't necessarily affect duration? i guess that should have been my initial post.